Rhetoric

overview

Politicians communicate their policy positions, but also stories about their personal lives and their perspective on the world. In doing so, what they will say and how they will say it? How much emotion will they put in their words? How complicated will they make their sentences? By doing this politicians reveal something of their personality. In the Hot Politics Lab, we analyze all preceding questions, and aim to develop a model

that predicts what politicians will say (topic, position) and how they will say this. Are politicians strategic and will they tailor their messages to public opinion, or are politicians unable to adapt, and does personality explain their communication? We will find out.

You will find some of our preliminary findings in the publications, working papers and blogs mentioned below.

chapters, data & other

Nr.

Citation

1

Gijs Schumacher, Martijn Schoonvelde, Denise Traber, Tanushree Dahiya, and Erik de Vries (2016). EUSpeech: A New Dataset of EU Elite Speeches. In Proceedings of the International Conference on the Advances in Computational Analysis of Political Text (PolText 2016), Dubrovnik, 75–80.